Entirely separate from the question of how much homework is optimal: my mind boggles that some parents don't consider educating their children to be one of their responsibilities.
"[H]omework, spelling words included, “is not a part of our family life,” [a Halifax health-care worker] says. “I don't see why 6 1/2 hours of formal schooling isn't enough for an eight-year-old.”
After growing up in an Asian neighborhood and then going to good schools (which are almost by definition very Asian neighborhoods), then moving to Japan, I find my brain just totally vapor locking on this statement. "Thats funny, it almost sounds like she's expecting all education to take place at school. Ha, hah. Wait BOOM. She can't BOOM Is that even allowed?!"
I think it comes down to children being assigned up to 4 hours of homework (some of which is not reviewed by the assigning teacher) on top of 6 1/2 hours of in school time. Anyone who puts in 10 hour days as an adult feels the stress fairly shortly, never-mind a child under the same strain for 9 months.
I'm twenty years old; I was in elementary school slightly less than a decade ago. I'm reasonably sure I almost never had 4 hours of homework a week, much less 4 hours a day. So the options that present themselves to me are:
1) my teachers were all incredibly slack by modern
standards (which strikes me as unlikely)
2) I am far, far more intelligent than most people (which
strikes me as highly unlikely)
I suppose it's possible that there are just outlier schools where such a thing is the norm, but it's something completely alien to me.
Is anyone here capable of relieving me of my ignorance?
My impression is that things have changed in the last ten years. We have friends with young kids who have been through interview processes for preschool. Other friends have complained about the academics in their kids' preschool, or kindergarten (academics in kindergarten? Really? I recall playing and napping, and maybe learning the alphabet.) Many parents are concerned with preparing their kids for college while still in grade school, and the in many cases, it is likely the schools caving to the pressures of parents--they feel without homework, their kids won't be properly prepared.
That said, I don't think this is universal. We have friends who teach at smaller private schools that follow a more classical education model, and their students generally aren't required to do large amounts of homework.
I'm curious to know if you sent your kids to preschool or just homeschooled your kids all along? I'm seriously considering homeschooling my children and I'm sort of curious what other people have done with the first schooling decision.
Our older son went to "playschool" when he was three and part of four, and we've considered it for our younger son, who is turning four. We aren't terribly concerned about the "social" aspect of school, as our kids have no problems interacting with people (adults or kids their own age), and we are a part of a homeschool co-op.
We know several other homeschoolers that have done "normal" preschool for their kids, too. I don't think it's an either/or situation--in fact, it may give you some insight on how your kids learn best (we discovered that our son does really well when taught something one-on-one, but can often become frustrated in larger groups).
I have two children, 11 (grade 6) and 8 (grade 3). The homework is about an hour each night for the 8 year old, and can vary greatly for the 11 year old, anything from 1-2 hours (practicing what they were taught that day) to "projects" requiring about 16 hours of work over 2 weeks. They're both very bright children (yes, I know that all parents say that about their kids).
Do I think it's too much? Tough call. I do think it's ridiculous that my daughter is carting around a backpack to and from school that weighs half as much as she does. Also irritating is that the onus is on the parents to ensure that things get done, I'd rather that my child is taught responsibility than taught dependence but there is a lot of "sign this and return to indicate that your child did the work" kind of stuff.
Lastly, I recall as a child having time in school to do work around projects, and more often than not I had no homework because that time was given. From what I can tell, that kind of time no longer exists (or it does but there is more work).
I also don't recall having homework at all until I was in grade 6. It starts now in grade 1 (every night was about 15 minutes).
Also irritating is that the onus is on the parents to ensure that things get done, I'd rather that my child is taught responsibility than taught dependence...
Err, isn't it the parents' responsibility to build responsibility in their children rather than the schools'?
I'm not sure that the poster's point. When I was in grade school, the only thing my parents had to sign was my report card each quarter. It was my responsibility to do my homework, and my responsibility to shoulder the consequences if I didn't.
Not sure how I misunderstood. It sounded like he was irritated that it was his job to ensure his children completed their assignments by being forced to check and sign something, and would rather that they be taught, in school, to handle that responsibility themselves.
My point, probably poorly expressed, was that it's not realistic to expect the school to instill that sense of responsibility in the child, and that the "check and sign this" policy is really just a gentle encouragement to parents to take an active role in their education.
I understand what you're saying, and perhaps I came off as not wanting anything to do with my childrens education, which is definitely not what I meant.
I guess what I was getting at with the irritated part is that without my signature on the homework, it's deemed 'incorrect/incomplete'. This is teaching my children that they must rely on me for their own success. It's not that the school is not teaching responsibility (agreed that's my job), but that it's teaching dependence.
I also suspect that in many cases the work itself isn't looked at, a signature from me is looked for and that's it. If that's the case, it's a situation where the school is giving homework for the sake of giving homework, which I don't think is correct.
Maybe this is me being a pompous arrogant arse but I'd venture to say they by virtue of you posting here you are putting you are not part of the statistical average. Especially if you look at the survey that was conducted showing the wide disparity between the percentages of various personality types on Hacker News vs. the population at large...
Truth is: The vast majority of people don't think or behave like the people on this forum(?) do.
Edit: Just for the record nearly all of the software engineers I know scored in the 99th percentile on all of their standardized tests growing up. Obviously the merit of standardized tests can be argued - but I'm guessing you are smarter than msot people and just incredibly humble.
IMHO I don't disagree with homework. However in an education system that allows salaried teachers to reduce school hours without lowering their pay, and increase homework as a substitute is failing grossly. A child doing a 32 hour school week, should not be doing any more than 8 hours of homework per week. Anything over 44 hours for an adult (here in Canada at least) is considered overtime and cannot be forced upon an adult of legal age, so how in hell can it be forced on a minor without even parental consent?
I was regularly assigned over 16 hours of homework (2 hours a night, 6 hours over the weekend) after attending a 34 hour school week. That was 6 hours of mandatory work that I didn't consent to, and that was after several of my teachers stopped giving me homework (I understood math and science problems virtually in one go, by end of class I could be given a random equation made up on the spot by the teacher and get it right, so they quit giving me homework to save their own time).
It wasn't just the school year that was the problem. Once summer hit we'd be assigned 16-20 hour projects by virtually every teacher. Even on a full 12-month 44 hour per week standard, we were still doing far more work than an adult can legally be expected to do by an employer.
The local catholic school board to me, likely where any children I have will be attending (and where my wife and many of our friends attended) sets a maximum of 1 hour for all primary school children. Why this woman's children were receiving 4 hours a night is absurd and reeks of lazy and incompetent teaching. Sadly from my own experiences, I don't doubt it's true.
> But when Amanda Cockshutt's middle child, Malcolm, was asked by his Grade 7 English teacher to write five pages a week on his feelings about a book, the biochemistry professor told the school bluntly: “He is not doing that.”
> The teacher tried to justify the assignment, but the clincher for her, she says, was that other than a cheering word of praise, the teacher wasn't even correcting the mistakes
> When she was told she would have to teach her son cursive writing because there was no time at school, she never opened the book.
I know some people will chime in to say that kids have it 'too easy,' but it looks like in some cases here the kids are getting 'busy work.' If the teacher isn't even grading the work, then what is the point? If the teacher is giving the kids more work then he/she could possibly grade, then there is a disconnect somewhere that is to the children's detriment. If a kid is supposed to be writing 5 pages per week, and none of it is getting corrections from the teacher, then what is the child learning? I know that homework is supposed to be 'practice' in a lot of cases, but without corrections there's no point.
Too many parents want to prepare their children for "work" and not "university". I see it at my own kids' elementary school. My least favorite phrase is that they are "training my kids for jobs that haven't even been invented yet". Really? That sounds pretty complicated.
The thing is, the mentality has to change. I want my kids to have homework. I want them to be required to read more. I want them trained to go to College, not the work force. When they go to College, that's when they can decide what field to go after. If we do this, the kids that don't want to go to College are no worse off.
OK, now that being said, I wish my own public high school had been far more demanding on ME to read. I didn't take the initiative myself, and when I went to College and had to read 100 pages of an anthology in 2 days, I was pretty much screwed. I just hope my kids challenge themselves in school because I don't believe the teachers are going to do it, and I'm not sure if they'll want to listen to me much as teenagers :)
I'm not a parent so I can't say this from personal experience, but if you come home from work, do you want to still have a night full of more work, and better yet, do you want to deal with/feel the pain of your child having to? That's what college is for, not fucking elementary school. There is a limit to what's effective.
Also, studying all the time as a kid (or having a night full of homework every night) leaves you with less time to develop socially and hang out with friends. I don't want my kids to just hole themselves in their room all night doing homework.
I have 4 kids, homework or no homework, the work just begins when I get home from work (thankfully, I work for myself).
Elementary school should assign more homework. The kids actually enjoy it. Math games, story problems, reading fun stories. If they don't have homework, they actually CHOOSE to do something fun out of their workbooks. At that age, learning is fun.
Maybe it shouldn't be required or graded, but assigned and provided.
Later on, when they are more independent, I want their school work and homework to prepare them for college. Yes, this will require more of them academically.
There's always time for friends. Kids wouldn't have it any other way.
Maybe it's just the parent in me. I want my kids better prepared for college than I was, and I want them to have more and better opportunities than I had. I think hard schooling opens these doors.
I was pretty unreliable about homework, but the school I went to didn't necessarily take it out of my grades. At the time, I felt that the homework was unnecessary to learn the material being taught, so it was a waste of time.
Now, with kids of my own, I'm wondering if the reason I have so much trouble doing work that I find uninteresting, even when I intellectually believe that I'd be happier having done it, is that I never practiced doing boring work while everyone else was. So even if homework is useless as a teaching tool, maybe the act of doing boring work teaches a useful life skill.
After reading the article I'm still torn on where to stand. School systems are under siege from parents and bureaucrats and the teachers are caught in the middle. What is the optimal amount of homework? Who benefits from rote work? If your a professor or college educated, chances are your children are in a better position, intellectually, than someone that never graduated highschool. Rote work probably won't for your kids, but might be necessary to someone else's kid. Most schools don't make a delineation between the have/have nots. So giving someone more work, and others less would create a different scandal.
I applaud Dr. Cockshutt's involvement with her kids work but there are a lot more parents that are only concerned about the reports that come at the end of the semester. Paying no attention to what's going on, currently. These are the majority of parents. But really, it's about the teachers covering their ass. That way when some parent pleads ignorance about their kid failing teacher can point to every paper that was signed by said parent.
I'm an English teacher and I think kids don't actually need homework, so much as teachers need more time in the classroom that they're just not going to get. Homework is the spillover practice tasks that we don't have time to have students do in class, because we have to get through a certain amount of material in a class of 30+ students, who all have different learning speeds. If I was working with just one student, he would never have to do homework. But because we can't put our full energies into just one student, but must instead parse it out among so many, homework time is supposed to compensate by giving students time to think and process the material further.
25 comments
[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 91.3 ms ] thread"[H]omework, spelling words included, “is not a part of our family life,” [a Halifax health-care worker] says. “I don't see why 6 1/2 hours of formal schooling isn't enough for an eight-year-old.”
After growing up in an Asian neighborhood and then going to good schools (which are almost by definition very Asian neighborhoods), then moving to Japan, I find my brain just totally vapor locking on this statement. "Thats funny, it almost sounds like she's expecting all education to take place at school. Ha, hah. Wait BOOM. She can't BOOM Is that even allowed?!"
Is anyone here capable of relieving me of my ignorance?
My impression is that things have changed in the last ten years. We have friends with young kids who have been through interview processes for preschool. Other friends have complained about the academics in their kids' preschool, or kindergarten (academics in kindergarten? Really? I recall playing and napping, and maybe learning the alphabet.) Many parents are concerned with preparing their kids for college while still in grade school, and the in many cases, it is likely the schools caving to the pressures of parents--they feel without homework, their kids won't be properly prepared.
That said, I don't think this is universal. We have friends who teach at smaller private schools that follow a more classical education model, and their students generally aren't required to do large amounts of homework.
We know several other homeschoolers that have done "normal" preschool for their kids, too. I don't think it's an either/or situation--in fact, it may give you some insight on how your kids learn best (we discovered that our son does really well when taught something one-on-one, but can often become frustrated in larger groups).
I have two children, 11 (grade 6) and 8 (grade 3). The homework is about an hour each night for the 8 year old, and can vary greatly for the 11 year old, anything from 1-2 hours (practicing what they were taught that day) to "projects" requiring about 16 hours of work over 2 weeks. They're both very bright children (yes, I know that all parents say that about their kids).
Do I think it's too much? Tough call. I do think it's ridiculous that my daughter is carting around a backpack to and from school that weighs half as much as she does. Also irritating is that the onus is on the parents to ensure that things get done, I'd rather that my child is taught responsibility than taught dependence but there is a lot of "sign this and return to indicate that your child did the work" kind of stuff.
Lastly, I recall as a child having time in school to do work around projects, and more often than not I had no homework because that time was given. From what I can tell, that kind of time no longer exists (or it does but there is more work).
I also don't recall having homework at all until I was in grade 6. It starts now in grade 1 (every night was about 15 minutes).
Err, isn't it the parents' responsibility to build responsibility in their children rather than the schools'?
My point, probably poorly expressed, was that it's not realistic to expect the school to instill that sense of responsibility in the child, and that the "check and sign this" policy is really just a gentle encouragement to parents to take an active role in their education.
I guess what I was getting at with the irritated part is that without my signature on the homework, it's deemed 'incorrect/incomplete'. This is teaching my children that they must rely on me for their own success. It's not that the school is not teaching responsibility (agreed that's my job), but that it's teaching dependence.
I also suspect that in many cases the work itself isn't looked at, a signature from me is looked for and that's it. If that's the case, it's a situation where the school is giving homework for the sake of giving homework, which I don't think is correct.
Truth is: The vast majority of people don't think or behave like the people on this forum(?) do.
Edit: Just for the record nearly all of the software engineers I know scored in the 99th percentile on all of their standardized tests growing up. Obviously the merit of standardized tests can be argued - but I'm guessing you are smarter than msot people and just incredibly humble.
I was regularly assigned over 16 hours of homework (2 hours a night, 6 hours over the weekend) after attending a 34 hour school week. That was 6 hours of mandatory work that I didn't consent to, and that was after several of my teachers stopped giving me homework (I understood math and science problems virtually in one go, by end of class I could be given a random equation made up on the spot by the teacher and get it right, so they quit giving me homework to save their own time).
It wasn't just the school year that was the problem. Once summer hit we'd be assigned 16-20 hour projects by virtually every teacher. Even on a full 12-month 44 hour per week standard, we were still doing far more work than an adult can legally be expected to do by an employer.
The local catholic school board to me, likely where any children I have will be attending (and where my wife and many of our friends attended) sets a maximum of 1 hour for all primary school children. Why this woman's children were receiving 4 hours a night is absurd and reeks of lazy and incompetent teaching. Sadly from my own experiences, I don't doubt it's true.
> The teacher tried to justify the assignment, but the clincher for her, she says, was that other than a cheering word of praise, the teacher wasn't even correcting the mistakes
> When she was told she would have to teach her son cursive writing because there was no time at school, she never opened the book.
I know some people will chime in to say that kids have it 'too easy,' but it looks like in some cases here the kids are getting 'busy work.' If the teacher isn't even grading the work, then what is the point? If the teacher is giving the kids more work then he/she could possibly grade, then there is a disconnect somewhere that is to the children's detriment. If a kid is supposed to be writing 5 pages per week, and none of it is getting corrections from the teacher, then what is the child learning? I know that homework is supposed to be 'practice' in a lot of cases, but without corrections there's no point.
The thing is, the mentality has to change. I want my kids to have homework. I want them to be required to read more. I want them trained to go to College, not the work force. When they go to College, that's when they can decide what field to go after. If we do this, the kids that don't want to go to College are no worse off.
OK, now that being said, I wish my own public high school had been far more demanding on ME to read. I didn't take the initiative myself, and when I went to College and had to read 100 pages of an anthology in 2 days, I was pretty much screwed. I just hope my kids challenge themselves in school because I don't believe the teachers are going to do it, and I'm not sure if they'll want to listen to me much as teenagers :)
Also, studying all the time as a kid (or having a night full of homework every night) leaves you with less time to develop socially and hang out with friends. I don't want my kids to just hole themselves in their room all night doing homework.
Elementary school should assign more homework. The kids actually enjoy it. Math games, story problems, reading fun stories. If they don't have homework, they actually CHOOSE to do something fun out of their workbooks. At that age, learning is fun.
Maybe it shouldn't be required or graded, but assigned and provided.
Later on, when they are more independent, I want their school work and homework to prepare them for college. Yes, this will require more of them academically.
There's always time for friends. Kids wouldn't have it any other way.
Maybe it's just the parent in me. I want my kids better prepared for college than I was, and I want them to have more and better opportunities than I had. I think hard schooling opens these doors.
Now, with kids of my own, I'm wondering if the reason I have so much trouble doing work that I find uninteresting, even when I intellectually believe that I'd be happier having done it, is that I never practiced doing boring work while everyone else was. So even if homework is useless as a teaching tool, maybe the act of doing boring work teaches a useful life skill.
Yes - it teaches passive compliance. But this life skill is more useful to those assigning the drudgery than to those doing it.
I do have trouble sitting down to comment my code, though. And I think certain skills are better learned as a child.
I applaud Dr. Cockshutt's involvement with her kids work but there are a lot more parents that are only concerned about the reports that come at the end of the semester. Paying no attention to what's going on, currently. These are the majority of parents. But really, it's about the teachers covering their ass. That way when some parent pleads ignorance about their kid failing teacher can point to every paper that was signed by said parent.